Why do we live in a world where the only reward for hydrating is a large amount of piss?

Where are all the benefits the influencer girlies promised?

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Person running towards a washroom while holding a roll of toilet paper.
ILLUSTRATION: Victoria Xi / The Peak

By: C Icart, Humour Editor

Calling all members of the overhydration nation! 

Why did you recruit me? I can’t live like this anymore; I have things to do other than constantly running to the bathroom. There is such a thing as performative hydration, and I’m calling it out today. There are THREE main ways this doctrine manifests online (which is the same as everyday life, duh). 

  1. WaterTok
This phenomenon taught us there is no consensus over what is and is not water. How many sugar-free Skittles drink packs can you add to your water bottle before it’s no longer water? In some ways, it’s similar to this question that also rocked the Internet: what corpse2water ratio would you not be willing to swim in? In other ways, it’s not similar at all, and I just wanted to squeeze that question in there. Edit: I’ve been asked to explain this for those of us who are not constantly surfing the web for little hits of dopamine. Humans sometimes swim in bodies of water that definitely have corpses in them, like oceans, but would not swim in a pool with a corpse in it. Thus, there is an acceptable corpse2water ratio to swim in. What’s yours? Discuss. Now let’s get back to our regularly scheduled programming. WaterTok makes drinking water (or juice or punch or wannabe KoolAid) an event, and the FOMO is causing me to chug more water than there was in Finding Nemo.

It’s hard to believe that just earlier this year, people would bodycheck strangers at Target for this stainless steel bottle. Then, they would decorate it and attach fancy accessories to remind you they’re not poor. Many WaterTok beverages have been made in Stanley Cups. People attribute this behaviour to the cult of consumerism, but I think there’s a much darker truth behind this all. You know how some of us are just possessed by demons that make us overwater our plants? I think there’s a demon of overhydration that controls certain segments of the population. (Yes, I’m aware that that sentence made me sound like the type of person who would buy M.I.A’s tin foil hat that allegedly “blocks 5G waves”). 

3. 75 Hard

The 75 Hard challenge is the cockroach of fitness trends. It won’t dieeeee. I have beef with the entire thing, but I gotta stay locked in and talk about how this challenge is clearly pushed by Big Water. Why is it making people drink one GALLON (3.8 litres for the metric girlies) of water a day? I’m not a bio major so I cannot tell you how big my bladder is but it is not that big! Why is 75 Hard called a mental toughness program? It should be called a bladder toughness program! I have never had that much water in a day and I have still had days where my pee came out so clear I could bottle it and call it Dasani. 

I never thought I’d say this, but clearly some of y’all have too much access to safe drinking water. You have forgotten how to act. I know you want to fight back against beverage companies like BlueTriton (Nestlé in a trenchcoat) extracting water in our communities for profit at the expense of the land and people. But chugging it all at once is not the solution. I am breaking free from the overhydration movement once and for all and I’m sure my toilet paper costs are going to go down too #FrugalEra.

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